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GetSmart: Education Standardization: Essential or Harmful?

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GetSmart: Education Standardization: Essential or Harmful?

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In my previous post, I described how much of the standardization that exists in our current system of schooling is harmful to students and should be eliminated, but made the argument that not all standardization is harmful - that, in fact, in some cases it is essential to enable innovation and transformation. Today I will discuss some areas where standardization is possible, some advantages and disadvantages of each of these, and my rationale for whether standardization at this level is helpful or harmful.

Standardized level, pace, and path of learning

Advantages

Ease of implementation at scale

Meets expectations of educators, community, and politicians

Already implemented at scale and doesn't incur the significant risks associated with change

Disadvantages

Inefficient for any given student's learning

Contributes to disengagement among students

Conclusion: HARMFUL - The most obvious and concrete problem with standardizing level, pace, and path is illuminated by how poorly that serves students who are far from "average" in any given academic area. It isn't news that students who "get" the material quickly often disengage due to boredom and students who struggle disengage due to hopelessness. Solutions that help mitigate the issue, such as problem, project, cross-disciplinary, or inquiry based learning do so by beginning to break down the assumptions about level, pace, and path yet require tremendous investment of resources to overcome a structural problem that, perhaps, needn't exist at all.

Standardized curriculum

Advantages

Standardized curriculum supports some level of equity by ensuring all students have access to curriculum which has been found adequate by representatives of their communities

Teacher-proofing through scripted curriculum reduces harm that can be done by poor teachers

The current system of curriculum adoption with highly invested and influential incumbents (as well as hopeful wanna-be's) will support continuation of status quo, again not incurring the risks associated with change

Disadvantages

Standardizing curriculum severely limits the opportunities for students to learn by enforcing a one-size-fits all curriculum

Curriculum standardization de-professionalizes teaching by marginalizing the professional judgment, experience, and skill of teachers (to the degree that the curriculum is scripted and prescriptive.)

Standardization here tends to shift professional practice towards content coverage and away from deep understanding

Conclusion: HARMFUL - When curriculum is used as a tool (or one of many tools) by a skilled teacher in helping students achieve meaningful outcomes, it counts as highly useful. However, as is far more often the case, when a prescribed curriculum imposes exactly one correct way (generally based on content-transfer pedagogy) for students to achieve those outcomes, it dooms many students to failure where alternative approaches may help them to succeed. It also creates a sort of "learned helplessness" among teachers who are trained to cover curriculum rather than find the best ways for a particular student to learn. Curriculum is an area that can benefit tremendously from innovation - a sure sign that it is a poor area for standardization.

Standardized assessments

Advantages

Standard assessments can be a useful tool for highlighting issues of equity, making it possible to compare the achievements of large student groups by race and socioeconomic status and to identify systemic disparities.

Standardized assessments provide parents and students with insight with respect to one measure of a school's track record in student achievement as compared with other schools locally, nationally, and internationally.

It is possible for standardized assessments to provide feedback loops for schools regarding how students are progressing that can be used to improve schooling.

Disadvantages

High quality assessments are very expensive to administer at scale and so are generally discarded in favor of multiple-choice tests that are relatively narrow and of limited utility in gauging the achievements of an individual student.

The existence of standardized, summative tests is leading our political and educational system to fallaciously believe that what we need to understand about student growth can be distilled down to their performance on a specific test of knowledge and procedures on a given day. This belief has led to the inappropriate use of mediocre high-stakes summative testing as a proxy measure for individual student success.

The high-stakes nature of summative testing biases schools towards focusing on test success at the cost of other learning that may better serve students in the long run. Rather than serving as an indicator of overall student learning, the test becomes the end goal in itself.

Conclusion: DANGEROUS AND HARMFUL (for now) - My deep concern with standardized testing is contextual rather than intrinsic and derived from two key issues:

First are the relative paucity of quality standardized tests and the immaturity of scalable standardized testing on many levels. There is interesting work happening in this area and I am hopeful that we will eventually arrive at a point where assessment is rich, deep, wide, authentic, useful, and meaningful for a single student (not just large populations in aggregate.) As innovation in the area of summative testing continues to move forward and improve, it will be critical to take advantage of better assessments, such as those associated with the common core, while recognizing their limitations and continuing to evolve those assessments until their limitations are overcome or the use of the results is consistent with whatever limitations remain.

Second is the inappropriate use of data with limited validity and scope. Again, there is interesting work happening here - perhaps we will find ourselves with rich digital continuous assessments that are used to measure student progress towards mastery that offer meaningful and scalable ways to gain insight into student growth. At that point, standardization of assessment would move from harmful to useful, giving students the power to understand how their effort has been rewarded and to judge where to put their effort to continue to progress.
I remain optimistic that the science of assessment will evolve rapidly and for the better in an era of big data. Formative assessment will no longer consist of quizzes and midterm exams but rather become a side effect of students interacting authentically with great problems and challenges in a digital environment. Data about approaches that a student tries, how the student persists in the face of challenges, where the student turns for deeper understanding will, someday soon, be able to drive feedback loops that deeply inform a teacher's, parent's and student's understanding of a child's learning. Summative assessments will become a light-touch snapshot that provides some comparative insight between populations but that doesn't inappropriately usurp the roles that ought to be filled by rich, continuous, embedded assessments, by meaningful measures of student growth, or by thoughtful evaluation of teacher performance by professional communities of practice.

However. Until those advances are realized, the current context and limited capabilities of standardized tests generally lead their use, in practice, to be counterproductive, with harmful unintended consequences which are potentially outright dangerous to our system of education.

Standardized expectations

Advantages

Standard expectations on what students should know and be able to do on completing public education supports some level of equity.

Standard expectations make it possible to shift the focus from the "process" of teaching and learning (did everyone follow the scripted curriculum?) to the "outcomes" (what do students know and what can they do?) regardless of the path or pace taken to achieve mastery.

Standardizing at the level of expectations makes it possible to innovate at the level of personalization. There is a strong need for innovation in the "how" of teaching and learning, while standardization of expectations provides sufficient structure to evaluate pedagogy, culture, interventions, resources, technologies, and other elements of schooling with respect to how well those standards are met.

Standardizing at the level of expectations also strongly supports market-driven innovations for teaching and learning by consolidating the market and making it viable for truly innovative and useful new products to reach a wide audience.

Disadvantages

If expectations are standardized at a "rote performance" level, schools are biased against spending time and energy on teaching and learning that goes beyond that level.

If expectations are standardized to prepare students for work and life as well as college courses, on the other hand, the expectations are likely to outstrip our ability to assess outcomes against them.

Conclusion: USEFUL - The past several years have seen a nation-wide recognition of the dangers and inadequacies of limited, rote-performance standards of what students should know and be able to do. The resulting Common Core Standards and more recent Next Generations Science Standards have successfully shifted the focus of student outcomes to practical, cross-disciplinary, higher-level performance that gets at deep understanding rather than simple rote performance. The challenging part of using these standards comes in determining the role of assessments (particularly digital assessments) and the use of data in feedback loops to improve instruction.

Because the tools to measure outcomes, (indeed, the very metrics themselves) are still immature, data-driven decision-making against complex performance within the adaptive systems that are modern work-places and (ideally) places of learning, is likely to very quickly lead us astray - as though we were blindly following a compass that had lost true north, and ignoring the landmarks even though we can see them. Fortunately, though, with high quality standards to set our destination, we can rely on the judgment of experienced human educators who can recognize the "landmarks" of learning to make decisions about whether we are on course or not. The immature, but evolving, data science of education can and should inform that human judgment and, in turn, itself become improved by the feedback loops resulting from that application of judgment and experience.

Standardized data formats and interoperability

Advantages
Standardized data formats enable sharing of data between educational applications, making it possible to provide a complete and coherent set of data regarding the learning of a given student in order to personalize that students learning, or to provide anonymized data back to educational software developers to help them rapidly improve the quality of their offerings, or to provide anonymized and aggregated data to scholars and researchers to help improve education science. In theory, well-structured feedback loops including student data could drive new innovations and improve learning on Internet time. Revolutionary!

Disadvantages

Standardized data formats and access can create opportunities for exploitation, through the deliberate or accidental revelation or commercial uses of private student information.

Students may come to be defined (and therefore limited) by the necessarily narrow view created by the metrics and data chosen to be stored in standardized formats.

Conclusion: ESSENTIAL and DANGEROUS - Students have the right to reclaim power over their education, to personalize their goals, paths, and pace and to be supported by informed, capable educators in doing so. This level of personalization requires students and their parents and teachers to have understanding and insight regarding their performance and the paths available to them for meeting their goals. Standardizing at the level of data formats and interoperability enables critical innovation to happen one level higher where software developers create maps, dashboards, or other visualizations that help students, parents, and teachers understand that student's learning and build a personalized path towards mastery.

Further, making such data available to researchers opens doors for understanding learning that becomes qualitatively different from the kinds of research available prior to the advent of big data. The benefits are too great to ignore, but the dangers of putting student data in the hands of commercial (or even scholarly) entities are unacceptable until such time as we standardize mechanisms for ensuring student privacy.

Fortunately, there are leading organizations, such as InBloom and Amplify that are setting the precedent of ensuring, with world-class software security approaches, that student data stays within the district and that the judgment of educators, administrators, and parents are used to decide how and whether that data is shared. So, proceed with caution here, but do proceed.

Standardized (high) level of digital access

Advantages
If pegged to the level of access enjoyed by affluent students (24/7 Internet access via modern, personal devices) as opposed to a level designed for minimal equity (time-shared devices at libraries and schools), a standardized level of digital access is a necessary (though not sufficient) step towards reducing the digital access divide.

Disadvantages
There are significant costs to providing access for all students. There are even higher costs associated with the changes in culture and practice required to take advantage of an infrastructure that provides 24/7 digital access for all students.

Conclusion: ESSENTIAL - The advantages, benefits, and power enjoyed by those who have 24/7 digital access versus those who don't is dramatic and accelerating. Basic infrastructure supporting this level of access universally is not only a necessary (though insufficient) requirement for addressing both the achievement gap and the digital divide, standardizing at this level enables critical innovation at the next level up. Educators, at scale, will be able to innovate and evolve their practice to more student-centered models when they can rely on all students having acceptable levels of access. Commercial developers, foundation grant-makers, and scholarly researchers will be able to innovate in digital resources and practices that reduce achievement gaps when they can rely on their products being accessible to all students.

As will become increasingly clear over the course of the next several years, quality digital access is not only a question of academic achievement, but of social justice.

The decision regarding where and how to standardize is complex, ambiguous, and highly context-dependent. The question of whether the benefits outweigh the risks may be answered differently for different communities or classrooms and may depend heavily on how or whether the associated risks are understood and mitigated. The above list is hardly exhaustive, and I confess my opinion about some of these are in flux - changing as my understanding becomes more nuanced and as I learn more about how proposed standardization is actually evolving in practice.

Standardization is a polarizing issue due to its importance, its complexity, and its context-dependence. Answers require systemic approaches that consider the possible unintended consequences and potential exploitation of standards. I invite you to challenge my thinking, my assumptions, and my beliefs on the complexities of standardization. I also invite you to challenge your own and to add to this conversation.

Marie Bjerede is President at Agentic Learning. Follow Marie on Twitter at @mbjerede.

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Education Standardization: Essential or Harmful? | Getting Smart

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In my previous post, I described how much of the standardization that exists in our current system of schooling is harmful to students and should be eliminated, but made the argument that not all standardization is harmful - that, in fact, in some cases it is essential to enable innovation and transformation.

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ThoughtCo.: Examining the Pros and Cons of Standardized Testing

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ThoughtCo.: Examining the Pros and Cons of Standardized Testing

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What You Need to Know About Standardized Testing

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Debate over the need for standardized testing in classrooms isn’t slowing down. Arguments on both sides of this issue cover the pros and cons.

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Educationpost: Don't Believe the Hype: Standardized Tests Are Good for Children, Families and Schools

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Educationpost: Don't Believe the Hype: Standardized Tests Are Good for Children, Families and Schools

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Latasha Gandy is the Minnesota Program Director for Students for Education Reform (SFER). Latasha co-founded and co-led SFER's chapter at Metropolitan State University from 2012... Full profile →

A major effort is underway to cut back on standardized testing because many, including President Obama and Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton, argue that too many tests detract from student learning in the classroom. As decisions are weighed about which tests to eliminate, I want to be sure we don't send the wrong message to our children.

The students and families of Students for Education Reform-Minnesota know the power of standardized tests as a tool in the fight for educational justice. We believe schools should send the message that they want to know how our children are doing against national learning benchmarks, and that they'll use the results to make sure our children-especially children of color and low-income children-are getting an education equal to that of their more affluent and white peers.

Today's testing debate has become so politicized that we forget that we were once sitting in our children's seats.

If you're like me, growing up you needed to bring a #2 pencil to school some days. You'd take a timed test and answer questions about a paragraph you'd just read, solve a long division problem or complete an analogy. These tests required critical thinking skills I've used throughout my life-in fact not having them would have put me at a disadvantage. I want to my kids to have these skills, too.

Taking tests wasn't a traumatic experience for me and many others, it was a reasonable and necessary one. Sadly, that's not the message kids are getting these days from an unlikely source: teachers.

Adults didn't tell me that tests were stressful, that I couldn't handle them, or that my school would be punished based on my performance. Teachers didn't discourage me from participating in what is a completely reasonable school activity: measuring student progress.
So why are children suddenly unable to emotionally cope with standardized tests in 2016? Has anything changed since we took them? Or could it be that our children are capable of taking tests, but adults aren't comfortable with what the testing reveals?
In fact, teachers regularly gave us spelling and math quizzes to measure what we learned. There was even testing in gym with the annual Presidential Fitness Award. All of these tests are still given today, yet nobody's boycotting them.

Year after year, standardized test results have exposed glaring racial biases in our education system. Teachers and schools are no longer able to hide behind school averages in performance, and are now having to answer for the low academic performance of students of color and low-income students. Many parents are being told to boycott these tests when really we should be looking more closely at the results.

Standardized test scores are now broken down by student race and income. This allows everyone-including teachers, parents and policymakers-to see how inequitable our schools are. If you've heard of what's commonly called the " achievement gap "-the shocking difference in educational outcomes between white students and students of color-you probably have standardized tests to thank. With test results, we can no longer hide the underlying racial inequity in our schools, and we cannot and should not go back and pretend it doesn't exist.

Thanks to standardized test results:

We can see whether a child is at grade level and how he or she is performing relative to other children in the next class, across town and around the country.

We can see that schools in higher income neighborhoods-often considered the "good schools"-are only performing well for Caucasian students. The majority of black, latino and native students are not getting a high-quality education there.

We can make informed choices for our children. Test data show that in some schools children have a 1 in 10 chance of reading at grade level. Put another way: the odds are against children learning at such schools. This data allows us as parents to seek out schools that are effective at teaching our children.

Report cards and teacher feedback are helpful tools in gauging our children's academic progress, but they are subjective. They tell us how well our children's teachers think they are doing according to unique assignments and tests they create, but don't compare our children's progress against a set of standard learning benchmarks.

Many teachers embrace standardized test data. They use it to celebrate success and pinpoint areas for improvement. My own children attend schools that use testing to set goals and measure progress rather than consider it a punishment. The school regularly shares test data with me, has a clear plan for helping my daughters in areas they're struggling in, and gives me tips I can use at home. Our family talks openly and positively about the tests. Setting goals and achieving them is a source of pride for us and builds my daughters' confidence.
3 Questions to Ask Your Child's School About Testing:
Our kids are capable of greatness. They can and must take the tests so we know if they're mastering the critical skills they are learning from great teachers and great classes, skills they'll need to pursue the college and career of their dreams. And, guess what? We adults are emotionally capable of handling them too.

1. How does your staff talk about testing? At many schools individual teachers tell students to boycott the tests-even stopping children on their way to the testing room to discourage them. Other schools see them as a positive and a chance to help their students stay on track and grow. Let the principal know your expectations for how tests are talked about with your child by every staff member at the school.

2. What will you do with the results? Are results shared with students and their families, and do teachers explain their children's scores and how students rank locally and nationally? Is there a plan to boost achievement at school in needed areas through targeted instruction? Is the school upfront about identifying and targeting any gaps they find in outcomes between students of different races or incomes?

3. What skills are measured by the tests and how will you ensure my child masters them? Talk to your child's teachers at the beginning of the year about the skills he/she needs to master and find out the teacher's plan for ensuring your child masters these. After the tests, make sure the teacher identifies ways to get your child on track, keep them on track or challenge them to achieve beyond their grade level. Teachers should also let you know what you can do at home to support your child.

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Don't Believe the Hype: Standardized Tests Are Good for Children, Families and Schools

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Latasha Gandy is the Minnesota Program Director for Students for Education Reform (SFER). Latasha co-founded and co-led SFER's chapter at Metropolitan State University from 2012... Full profile → A major effort is underway to cut back on standardized testing because many, including President Obama and Minnesota Gov.

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A Philosopher's Blog: Standardization in Education

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A Philosopher's Blog: Standardization in Education

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Huffington Post: Standardization Will Destroy Our Education System, If It Hasn’t Already

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Huffington Post: Standardization Will Destroy Our Education System, If It Hasn’t Already

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This summer I have made a commitment to reading more, and have chosen books that I think will help me become a better leader. A few weeks ago I finished Drive by Daniel Pink and am now halfway through Linchpin by Seth Godin. I highly recommend both of these books to any educator who is interested about the science behind motivation or overcoming resistance in order to become an indispensible component of an educational organization.

Through my reading of both books, it has become painfully clear that many of our current politicians and so-called educational reformers have it completely wrong when it comes to standardization. Now, I have always thought this was the case, but these two books have not only reaffirmed my views, but have also given me a great deal of concern as we inch closer to an educational system that focuses on test scores as the number one determinant of achievement.

Dan Pink reveals that the keys to unlocking and sustaining intrinsic motivation are autonomy, mastery, and purpose. As a leader, this is the type of teaching and learning culture that I want to foster and cultivate, one where creativity flourishes, students find relevancy and meaning in their learning, and teachers are given the support to be innovative. A teaching and learning culture powered by intrinsic motivation will achieve this.

Unfortunately, we are being forced in the opposite direction. The current education movement is laden with "if-then" rewards and a "carrots and sticks" approach to motivation. If students score well on standardized tests, they move on to the next grade level or graduate while their teachers receive favorable marks on evaluations. These are forms of extrinsic motivation and will work in short term, but performance will not be sustainable as it will be with those motivated intrinsically. The same can be said for merit pay. Pink has provided a compelling case as to why this will never work and this is supported by the research.

Students are not motivated by standardized tests, as they find no true meaning and value in them. Teachers are motivated for all the wrong reasons, some of which includes job security or a financial incentive. A focus on standardization narrows the curriculum and creates a teaching culture where creativity, exploration, and critical thinking are scarce or non-existent. It creates a culture that students do not want to be a part of and one that can only be sustained with the use of "if-then" rewards or "carrots and sticks." Is this the direction we want to go? Do we want schools to squash creativity and reinforce a model that worked well in the 20th century but will not prepare our students for their future?

Seth Godin describes linchpins as indispensable components of an organization -- artists in their own right. These individuals don't follow a manual, but instead are guided by an urge to do what is right. In my opinion, we want to create schools that allow teachers to become linchpins because, in the end, students benefit from their creativity, passion, and innovative mindset. However, standardization follows in the footsteps of a century-old education model focused on industrialization, which influences teachers and administrators in a way where the artist in each of them never evolves. This entrenched system produces students that lack creativity, are fearful of failure, work extremely hard to follow directions (homework, study for tests, not question authority), and are leaving schools with undesirable skills in a post-industrial society. Schools focus more on filling the minds of students with useless facts and knowledge as opposed to learning essential skills that can't be measured with a #2 pencil.

Godin continues to provide example after example of how education has it all wrong. Take the resume for example. Virtually every school has students craft a resume to go along with their college application materials. Students don't need resumes, they need to create artifacts of learning that provide details as to what they can really do or know. Godin provides a compelling alternative to a traditional resume and hiring process. I have tweaked the business example he provided into an educational one. Instead of standardization, have students make a presentation of their resume and skills learned while in school. Have them defend, answer questions, and lead a discussion with a variety of stakeholders. Does this seem more meaningful and relevant? When analyzing the science of motivation presented in Drive, I would certainly say so.

My only hope, and this is wishful thinking, is that research and common sense will ultimately prevail to save our education system from future demise if those with influence and power keep steering us in a failed direction. Let us learn from the past and create an educational system that instills a sense of intrinsic motivation and creates learners that are indispensible.

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Standardization Will Destroy Our Education System, If It Hasn't Already

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This summer I have made a commitment to reading more, and have chosen books that I think will help me become a better leader. A few weeks ago I finished Drive by Daniel Pink and am now halfway through Linchpin by Seth Godin.

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U.S. News: The Long Death of Creative Teaching

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U.S. News: The Long Death of Creative Teaching